Icelandic woman who says she barely understands English yet considers herself an anti-Wu leader sues over being charged for incident outside the mayor's house back in the screaming days of 2022
Update: Case sent back to state court, where Baldursdottir voluntarily dismissed it on Sept. 25, 2023.
A woman who faces a misdemeanor larceny charge over the body-worn camera she says an officer managed to drop while pushing her out of the way of Mayor Wu's car outside the mayor's Roslindale home during an early morning Covid-19 screaming protest has sued the city, the mayor, all the judges who sit at West Roxbury municipal court and a clerk magistrate there for violating her civil rights.
Sigridur Baldursdottir says her arrest and subsequent and frequently delayed court hearings - due to an inability to supply her with an Icelandic translator - are not just violations of her rights under the First, Fourth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, but are part of a conspiracy against her, one that has caused her "severe emotional distress" on top of her existing PTSD.
Baldursdottir originally filed her suit in Suffolk Superior Court in March, but as it typically does, the city today petitioned to have the case "removed" to federal court because of the constitutional issues the suit raises. In her state filing, Baldursdottir said she was seeking $3.5 million in damages.
Baldursdottir's complaint starts by saying she is an Icelandic citizen with permanent residency here - she came to pursue her interest in art - and that, despite her inability to understand English well, she became a "prominent leader of a local civil rights movement that is often critical of Defendant Wu's political policies." The complaint notes that she often posed as a "gadlfy" at appearances by the mayor, including an Evacuation Day commemoration on March 17, 2022, at which a Boston Herald photographer caught her standing "deadpan" behind Wu while holding a sign that read: "Evacuate Wu."
According to her complaint, she was standing with other protesters outside Wu's Roslindale house on the morning of Feb. 3 when a BPD officer pushed her out of the way to clear the street for the mayor's vehicle to head out. In pushing her, the complaint alleges, the officer managed to disengage his body-worn camera and it fell to the ground.
Baldursdottir says she heard something fall to the ground, saw the device laying there and, believing it belonged to a protesting off-duty police officer whose SUV's rear hatch was open for ready access to an "overflowing" supply of noise-making equipment, put it in the vehicle. The officer returned to her vehicle, realized what the device was and "returned it to the BPD officer who had lost it."
The complaint says that after an on-duty officer wrote a citation, she has faced a series of sinister and constantly postponed hearings in West Roxbury court because everytime she and her lawyer appear, after requesting an Icelandic interpreter, none shows up. She said that on March 23 of this year, her lawyer called the clerk's office to make sure a translator would actually be present at a hearing scheduled the next day, only to be told he should know by now that no translator would ever come.
This is a particular hardship for a woman who still mostly speaks in Icelandic in her daily life, the complaint continues.
To Ms. Baldursdottir, the West Roxbury Court proceedings against her have been largely a "babble of voices." To Ms. Baldursdottir's counsel, it has been a challenge to provide her with meaningful consultation in those proceedings.
Even worse:
Ms. Bauldrsdottir's post-traumatic stress disorder has been aggravated severely as a result of the events described in this Complaint. She is constantly concerned about being placed in prison, about being deported back to Iceland, and about her ability to earn a living if she is convicted for larceny. The mix of Kafkaesque and Beckettian existential uncertainty created by court hearing after court hearing being continued in order to wait for an Icelandic interpreter, who never turns up, is severely psychologically tortous for Ms. Baldursdottir, who comes from a nation that deeply values free speech and due process. Over the entire year that the unlawful process against her has dragged on in West Roxbury Court so far, Ms. Baldursdottir has suffered extreme daily anguish and increasingly deteriorating mental health.
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Comments
"If you ever get close to a human
And human behavior
Be ready, be ready to get confused...."
In seriousness, mental illness is no laughing matter.
Then darling, maybe you should drop it
Then maybe you should drop it. Its a frivolous lawsuit based on very loose claims about Michelle Wu. If you keep on keep on, you deserve all the mental anguish you get. Don't bite off more than you can chew.
This lady is nuts and she clearly is just working the system because she has a lawyer who probably is working for free.
So, I am in way defending
So, I am in way defending this woman, but the things at West Roxbury Court were related to the larceny charge about the camera.
Baldur, come and get your daughter.
It's time to go home.
Being outside Wu's house
Being outside Wu's house early on a February morning would make me want to scream, too.
Also... this woman's behavior.
Bucket Bangers
Bucket Bangers are the worst of society.
She persisted.
She persisted.
Adorable.
Adorable.
"barely understands English"
Two things:
1) Apparently she understands enough English to have read the majority of the US Constitution which, last time I checked, was not written in Icelandic.
2) Icelandic people pretty much all speak English. 88% hear English daily and 65% hear English more than an hour per day. It's mandatory in public school for several years. You'd think someone coming to a foreign country would probably be speaking English fine.
"Person X can both speak
"Person X can both speak English, and not speak English" is, on the face of it, obviously false. Then again, one of the characteristics of the modern American right wing is the ability to believe ridiculous things.
not trying to defend her
since she sounds like a.. character.. but, couple things:
1) It's pretty easy to translate most anything, and there have been translations of the US Constitution out there for a long time in plenty of different languages. Whether there's one in Icelandic, I don't know, but it's not impossible.
2) While it does seem strange, given what we know about Iceland, it doesn't really matter what the national level stats for any particular country are. It's still possible that she or anyone else from a high English-proficiency country doesn't have the appropriate level of English to fully participate in their own proceedings. They are guaranteed the right to translation and interpretation and it should be provided for them.
Maybe she's lying, maybe it's just a desperate cynical legal defense, but it doesn't mean that it's just OK to fail to provide interpretation.
Bet me
I'm betting that she's completely misrepresenting the situation wrt translation. Wanna take me up on that?
do you mean
That she isn't really not proficient in English, or that there hasn't been a failure to provide interpretation?
If it's the former, yeah i have my doubts too, but if it's the latter, well it wouldn't even be available to her as grounds to sue if the city fulfilled its obligation to provide interpretation.
Maybe she is just doing it to be difficult, but i haven't seen anything from the city that indicates they believed she was lying about it.
Again, it's less about her as it is the city's obligation to provide services that lots of people actually do need. And it protects itself from litigation by doing what it's supposed to do.
Yes, I also suspect that she
Yes, I also suspect that she's fluent in English and pretending otherwise, but it's possible for someone to speak and understand enough English for ordinary conversations, but not to know/understand English-language legal terminology.
I will bet she’s misrepresenting
I will bet she is misrepresenting, too.
But, as a data point, my prior belief that everyone in Iceland is fluent in English was challenged when. I recently met an Icelandic couple. Her English was fluent, but he didn’t speak much English. He worked as a merchant seaman in Icelandic boats and his life just didn’t give him a lot of opportunity to speak English.
Scandinavians as a whole
Scandinavians as a whole speak really good conversational English - having visited several countries there English is widespread and well used and they're all very good at it. That said, I've had several run ins where there was confusion about a particular unusual term, or phrasing, and a bit of conversation had to happen to clarify. So in this case (while she's obviously got issues), it's not actually unrealistic that she speaks very good conversational everyday english but needs a translator for legal matters, considering how specific legal proceedings are in terms of phrasing, word meaning, etc. There's a reason that some interpreters are literally "legal translators" where they specialize in court matters.
Homeless people get favored in court. No fair!
Most of what Baldursdottir is claiming sounds like a dump truck filled with North Pole Polar Bear poop. The claims regarding English understanding are obvious lies. Her claim of PTSD sounds phony. She claims to be a leader in a local civil rights group? Is that the Icelandic Immigrants in America Who Suffer from Outrageous Civil Persecution? She should call the fellow who prefers Norwegian immigrants over the brown skin immigrants from the south.
But the worst part is that she is claiming that homeless people receive a level of justice that favors them and disfavors people who are not homeless or poor. Is she is bona fide mentally ill, that is unable to recognize good or bad, right or wrong? If not and is choosing to use homeless folks as a weapon in her prosecution of whatever her real complaint is (what is her real complaint?) then using homeless folks to push her hatred around is reprehensible and contemptuous.
That alone morally justifies deporting her back to Iceland. We have more than enough US citizens who would dump all their problems onto people who have the least. Her abuse just adds to the poison of the moral air in the US.
Thanks
Yeah, I didn't even get into that part of her argument, which is that a court session designed to help homeless people is somehow proof of a double standard in court.
Geographical Error
I don't recall there being any penguins around the North Pole. (Is there still a North Pole at all? It looks like a barber-shop pole, right? I thought it might have fallen into the sea when the ice melted.)
You might revise your comments to "a dump truck filled with Polar Bear plop", just for… you know… scientific accuracy.
Done
I wondered whether there are North Pole penguins. Rushed to write instead of researching.
No north polar penguins...
...closest match would be puffins and auks.
everybody in Iceland
speaks English
EVERYBODY!
Not true
I have spent time there. Everybody working in a professional or commercial job speaks English. Farmers, sheep ranchers, and fishermen not so much.
Ok
Lots of Icelandic sheep ranchers moving to Boston these days?
They come here
to ranch the sheeple.
Yes, but…
OK, but… if their teeth are chattering from the cold while they talk, is it still English, or more like Icelish?
Oh, wait, wrong era… now they're getting heat stroke. Never mind.
In defense of Icelandic women in America …
… we can thank Anna Björnsdóttir for helping the FBI capture the fugitive Whitey Bulger.